By

Robin Meadows
About the author

Robin Meadows is an independent science journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s a water reporter at Maven's Notebook, a California water news site, and contributor to Chemical & Engineering News, Ka Pili Kai, KneeDeep Times, and Scientific American. Robin is also a Pulitzer Center grantee, an Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources fellow, a contributor to The Craft of Science Writing, a mentor with The Open Notebook, and a UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program graduate. Find her on Tumblr and Twitter.

Articles by Robin Meadows

24
May

Robin Meadows

Among all the stories I've written for Estuary News, what makes two stand out in my mind? Location, location, location.
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Los Rios Check Dam open for fish passage. Photo: Max Stevenson
21
Mar

Reconnecting Putah Creek with the Ocean

After decades of restoration, recent Chinook salmon runs in Putah Creek have reached 1,800, producing young that swim toward the ocean by the tens of thousands. But, says Putah Creek streamkeeper Max Stevenson, this growing population still faces considerable obstacles.  Putah Creek flows from headwaters in the North Coast Ranges to the Toe Drain of the Yolo Bypass, and was dammed near Winters in the 1950s to divert water for Solano County. Salmon began coming to the creek after settlement of a lawsuit in the year 2000 that stipulated releasing water for fish as well as optimizing spawning grounds.  Salmon need loose gravel to dig spawning pits, or redds, that are up to six feet across. “They flop over and...
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12
Oct

The Long Haul to Restore San Joaquin Spring-Run Chinook

When a team of fish biologists was tasked with restoring spring-run Chinook salmon in the San Joaquin River in 2006, none of them quite knew where to begin. The riverbed had been parched for so long that someone even built a house in it. The salmon that once thronged up-river by the hundreds of thousands had vanished, and there was no precedent for jumpstarting a population from scratch.
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16
Jun

Building Buy-in for Restoration

The success of a restoration project is in the eye of the beholder. Take the recently revitalized salt marsh edging Drift Creek in Alsea Bay, Oregon. To ecologists, the sight of new channels winding through bare, brown mud is a thing of beauty, heralding the abundance of life to come, from sedges and rushes to fish and shorebirds. But, as researchers learned while speaking with people living nearby, not everyone shares this view. Some locals favored the unrestored side for its lush green vegetation and vistas of grazing elk. Resolving such differences in perception is key to local support, which can be required for project funding and permitting.  “Restoration can look unsightly at first,” said UC Davis salt marsh ecologist...
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16
Jun

Listening to Vital Voices

Jessica Rudnick’s first love was earth science. But after discovering that people’s beliefs and behaviors were key to solving environmental problems, she fell for social science. Now, as the California Sea Grant extension specialist for the Delta, Rudnick is working to better integrate local people into plans for the region. Understanding the needs of people who live, work, and recreate in the Delta could make the difference between fixes that are rejected or embraced.  Delta planning has historically focused largely on ecological health. But, like many estuarine areas, the Delta is a lived-in landscape. “There are socially embedded challenges that play out in environmental issues,” she says. “You can’t just throw more data and research at a problem and think...
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13
Apr

Atmospheric Rivers Intensifying as World Warms: How the West Will Know What’s Coming

In just a few years, tracking the West Coast’s atmospheric rivers by airplane has gone from what one hydrologist called “really wild-eyed stuff” to a Congressionally-funded operation. This Atmospheric River Reconnaissance program, which wrapped up its latest season in March, monitors these increasingly powerful storms as they shoot across the Pacific Ocean and delivers real-time data to National Weather Service forecasters. Knowing when, where, and how hard atmospheric rivers will hit is vital to ensuring water supplies and avoiding floods. “California can swing from 20 inches to 60 inches of rainfall per year,” says Atmospheric River Reconnaissance lead Marty Ralph, a research meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re very different from the rest of the country — that’s why...
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15
Feb

Hatchery Delta Smelt Released to Wild

On a mild day between rainstorms in mid-December, wildlife biologists outfitted in rubber boots and orange lifejackets load drum after drum of precious cargo onto a small boat docked in Rio Vista, a town on the Sacramento River in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. There is little fanfare but the occasion is nonetheless momentous. The shiny silver drums contain thousands of Delta smelt — finger-size imperiled fish unique to the Delta — that were raised in a conservation hatchery. Today marks the inaugural release of captive smelt into the cold, murky waters of their native home. “For the first time, we’re seeing if it’s possible for hatchery-raised Delta smelt to be released into the wild, survive, and successfully reproduce,” says Katherine...
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16
Dec

How the West Can Survive Smaller Snowpacks and Bigger Atmospheric Rivers

Mountains are the foundation of water in the western United States, natural infrastructure that captures snowfall during the winter and releases snowmelt over the spring and summer. In California, the snowpack holds nearly as much water on average as all the reservoirs put together, effectively doubling the state’s surface storage. But, as the world warms, we may not be able to rely on this ecosystem service much longer. A new study projects that snowpack shrinkage will likely disrupt the West’s water system well before the end of the century. This finding adds urgency to water managers’ efforts to adapt to climate change. “This is not a problem for later,” says Michael Anderson, state climatologist at the California Department of Water...
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25
Oct

Tracking Natural Nitrogen Removal

Nitrogen inputs to the San Francisco Bay are among the highest of estuaries worldwide, yet so far have not caused harmful impacts like extreme algal blooms, oxygen depletion, and fish kills. But resistance to this nutrient may not last. Ever since the Gold Rush, excess sediment from pulverized rock has been pouring into the Bay, clouding the water and keeping algae in check by blocking sunlight. Recently, however, that protective sediment has diminished in parts of the Bay, contributing to concerns over nutrient pollution. A new study on a natural nitrogen-removal process is key to predicting whether nitrogen will cause ill effects here, too. The Bay’s nitrogen comes primarily from sewage and, for the most part, this nutrient is not...
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17
Jun

Ancient River Channels Could Speed Groundwater Recharge

By the time California finally began regulating groundwater use in 2014, most of the San Joaquin Valley was in critical overdraft. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that groundwater pumping in the region has exceeded replenishment by an average of 1.8 million acre-feet per year over the last few decades. This imbalance was even worse during our last drought, when overuse shot up to 2.4 million acre-feet per year. Overpumping puts groundwater aquifers at risk of compaction, permanently reducing their water storage capacity and making surface lands sink. Now, however, San Joaquin Valley groundwater managers must find and implement a fix. The state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act mandates balancing the region’s pumping with replenishment by 2040. Managed aquifer recharge...
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23
Mar

Scientists Nail Climate Links to Extreme Events

While a supermajority of Americans finally believe we are warming the world, a 2020 Yale Climate Opinion survey shows that most people still aren’t very worried about it. “Climate change is abstract to them,” says UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain. “They don’t connect it to their personal lives.” But Californians do. Reeling from a decade of record-shattering drought, heat waves, and wildfires, people in the Golden State overwhelmingly tell Public Policy Institute of California pollsters that the effects of global warming have already begun. Indeed, Swain confirms, researchers can now link climate change with some of today’s extreme events beyond a reasonable doubt. “Climate change is a slow process, it kind of sneaks up on you, but we’re at the...
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01
Mar

Filling significant recently identified gaps in monitoring spring-run Chinook is critical to protecting these threatened Central Valley salmon.

“There’s no way we can manage them for recovery if we don’t understand the biological processes that govern their dynamics through time and space,” says UC Santa Cruz/NOAA salmon expert Flora Cordoleani, lead author of a study reported in the December 2020 issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science. Cordoleani and colleagues identified the monitoring gaps while building a model of the spring-run Chinook life cycle. The model accounts for three self-sustaining populations of these at-risk fish, assessing survival of key life stages (eggs, fry, smolts and adults) as well as in key habitats (natal creeks, the Sacramento River, floodplains in the Sutter and Yolo bypasses, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and San Francisco Bay). “It’s a complex model, and...
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18
Nov

Current estimates of young salmon lost to the south Delta pumps are based on a smattering of studies from the 1970s and should be updated, according to a new analysis.

“They don’t represent current operations,” says Ukiah-based consultant Andrew Jahn, lead author of the analysis reported in the September 2020 issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science. Current operations at the State Water Project (SWP) and the Central Valley Project (CVP) can reverse flows in the Old and Middle rivers, diverting salmon on their way to the ocean towards the projects. Existing salmon loss estimates also fail to account for a likely Old River hotspot for predators, drawn to the influx of salmon and other fish near the two water projects. Evidence of this hotspot lies in the numerous acoustic tags from young salmon to be found in the sediment, which were presumably defecated by striped bass, as well as...
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22
Sep

Nursing Salmon on Flooded Farms

In 2012 a team of salmon researchers tried a wild idea: putting pinky-sized Chinook on a rice field in the Yolo Bypass, a vast engineered floodplain designed to protect the city of Sacramento from inundation. The team found that rearing fish on farms works better than they had ever dreamed.
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06
Jul

Surface water diversions in California’s Central Valley can be estimated based on readily available climate data, say researchers—a boon to efforts to track groundwater use.

Valley groundwater pumping is calculated as the total water demand minus surface water deliveries. However, today’s water model relies on individually reported diversions across the entire valley, and compiling all these data is a slow process; by the time the numbers are crunched, assessments of groundwater use are already outdated. “It can take years,” says Jordan Goodrich of University of Waikato in New Zealand. “It’s one of the biggest problems we face in tracking the Central Valley water budget.” Overdrafting groundwater can cause subsidence, permanently reducing the storage capacity of aquifers as well as jeopardizing above-ground infrastructure that delivers water and controls flooding. In the March 2020 issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, Goodrich and colleagues at Scripps...
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18
Jun

Small Town and Big Marsh Brace for Spreading Bay

When heavy rains coincided with an extreme high tide in 2005, water from the Carquinez Strait overtopped flood protections in the City of Benicia. Making matters worse, the high seas also submerged stormwater outfalls. Water backed up stormdrains, inundating historic homes and small businesses. As tides keep rising, scenarios like this will play out more often―and with greater severity―along the Solano County shoreline.
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18
Jun

Forty Miles of Creek, Six Adaptation Projects

In 2017, a perfect storm hit the City of San Jose in Santa Clara County. Coyote Creek, which winds through the heart of the city, overtopped its banks, flooding businesses and hundreds of homes up to depths of six feet. Thousands of people were evacuated and property damages exceeded $70 million. “If I’ve learned anything in my 25 years here, it’s that you have to give creeks room to move, which also creates more resilience to climate change,” says Valley Water's Afshin Rouhani...
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19
Mar

Taking a Break from the Corps

Corte Madera creek is an outsized problem for people in Ross and other towns built right up to its banks. “Our peaceful creek turns into a rushing torrent in winter,” says Chris Martin, who grew up in the small Marin County town. Finding a fix has been contentious since 1971, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put a mile-long concrete flood control channel through Ross.
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19
Mar

Opening the Mouth of Walnut Creek

Paul Detjens is driving us from his Martinez office to a restoration site near the mouth of Walnut Creek on Suisun Bay, a project he spearheads as an engineer for the Contra Costa County Flood Control District. These lower reaches of the creek — straightened, widened, and leveed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — have been a sluggish, silt-filled problem for more than half a century. Detjens has worked to find a solution for the last 17 years. Now that the district has taken the unusual approach of parting ways with the Corps in favor of local control, a fix is finally in sight. Goals include protecting people from floods, restoring habitat, reconnecting the creek with its historical...
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